When the car stopped, we looked over the western boundaries of the Warehouse District, parked in an alley bordered by the harbor and a closed factory. Verweald Harbor covered roughly half of the city's coastline, most of the docks owned by the numerous corporations and their shipping contemporaries dotting the Warehouse District's limits. With evening clouds cloaking the moon, the harbor's murky water assumed a black, mire-like consistency, jeweled lines of oil and grease distorting the surface as small undulations rose and butted against the rocky embankment. A steel fence topped with rusted barbed wire encircled the docks, and access was only granted by a series of locked gates flanked by corroded security lamps lacking their now shattered bulbs.

Frowning, I gazed through the fence's steel bars and watched the tethered vessels bob bleached and monochrome on the writhing swill below. What an ugly night. Darius and I let ourselves out of the car—and I gagged.

"What is that?!" I sputtered, a hand plastered over my nose and mouth to ward off the stink. An odor akin to rotting fish guts thickened the air, so much so I could almost swallow it. Unperturbed, Darius lifted his chin to the building behind the alley, and I glanced upward to read the flickering neon words Jacobson's Fish Cannery highlighted against the grimy bricks. Ah. So it was fish guts. "That's foul. What are we doing here?"

Darius's leather jacket landed on the seat before he slammed the door shut and I fumbled with the keys to lock the car. He rounded the hood and crossed the grubby alley to stand at the fence, arms folded over his chest. "Because your good friend Mitch owns one of these vessels."

I joined the Sin at the fence, stumbling in the blooming ice plants growing between the harbor's enclosure and the alley's concrete. A number of private boats floated among the larger ships operated by Verweald's various industries, and the largest was a thin white yacht docked adjacent to a behemoth cargo ship bearing the DPC Innovations seal on its hull. "I don't think Mitch owns a boat," I told Darius as I listened to the sloshing water, the calling gulls working themselves into a frenzy over the smell of rotting fish. Somewhere beyond these immediate sounds, I could hear the murmur of dockworkers and late-night laborers, their voices echoing across the dirty water.

"As of yesterday, he does." The Sin smirked, his gaze narrowed in the distance, and in the moonless dark I noticed a subtle lambency in his skin, a barely perceptible, golden bioluminescence flicking in and then out of existence. Does he glow in the dark? For God's sake. "I worried humans had perhaps changed in the intervening years, but my worries were for naught; to find Mitch, all I had to do was follow the money. A few well-placed threats and phone calls uncovered a sum allocated to an offshore account he then used to purchase a yacht, pay to dock it here for a week, and buy several drums of petrol—gasoline, and provisions. It seems he's planning on taking an extended excursion."

I let the information settle like heavy stone sinking, sinking, dropping into place in the bedrock of my mind. "He was—paid. Paid for—?"

"For you, obviously. For your delivery."

My eyes drifted over the marina again and drank in the lights reflecting from the opposing embankment. My hands shook. "He couldn't have possibly been paid enough for one of these."

"It was a considerable sum." The Sin moved, footsteps crunching the vegetation beneath his soles, and I followed with one hand against the bars to steady myself.

"How much is considerable?"

"Enough to buy a ship."

"How much is that?"

He jerked his head and fixed me with a hard, speculative glare. "Enough to pay for his discretion. Enough for him to choose you and your kin, enough for him to hunt and hand you over without a backward glance. Whatever number I list, you would not be satisfied with the price paid—so what does it matter?"

Swallowing, I watched his outline glide forward through the accumulated night, and I struggled to keep pace. Tara, Rick, and I hadn't been random victims snatched off a busy thoroughfare; we'd been selected, chosen to die, and I couldn't fathom why. Why us? No answer could possibly justify the results.

Darius stopped abruptly, and I collided with his back, stumbling on the weeds and landing on my backside in the dirt. "A warning would be nice."

"There." He jabbed a finger through the bars and pointed out the large yacht I'd noticed before. It gleamed among the other vessels, a flagrant arc of blue painted in a slender ribbon along the starboard side, the paint not yet corroded by salt and harsh summer sun. "I traced him to a recently abandoned residence some number of blocks west of the bank he frequented; we can assume he's...jumping ship." Leaning down, Darius gripped the collar of my blouse and lifted me upright, sparing no attention for anything aside from the harbor and the swayed boats. "Something has spooked him. He has withdrawn the weregild from his account and is preparing to flee the country by boat."

I scoffed and winced at the fresh bruises forming on my backside, leveling the Sin a bitter glance before dropping my eyes to the plants once more. "Sometimes, I find it difficult to believe any of this is happening. What type of man sells a woman to a cult to buy a yacht?"

"A dishonest man, obviously." We moved to one of the gates interspersed along the fence, stopping at a rusted No Trespassing sign hung above a slimmer sign listing marina rules. Darius tested the latch and found it locked. "I hardly doubt you are his first victim, but I can say you will be his last." The creature's teeth flashed in the night.

Warmth brought on by lingering sentiments of shame and resentment crept into my face, and I stepped around Darius, testing the gate as well, greeted by the same clash of metal when I twisted the latch. Sighing, I peered into the dark to watch Mitch's boat drift on the briny current, voices rising from the deck of a fishing ship, and though I couldn't discern their physical presence, I could hear crates being shifted about. Jagged river rocks and concrete comprised the embankment on the opposing side of the fence, disappearing into the murky shallows below. "It's pointless to climb the fence unless you can vault ten feet up with me on your shoulders and are up to swimming for the dock through that swill. We can't try to break the gate open without attracting attention. What are we—?"

Darius looped an arm around my waist and his hand landed on my middle as he shoved me back into his chest. I yelped—and when sucked in a breath to demand what he thought he was doing, the world went black.

The weight of his arm remained constant against my stomach, but the ground seemed to vanish below my feet, the air in my lungs stolen by an inexplicable pressure overcoming us both, covering my mouth, orange and crimson sparks flickering in the swirling, searing blackness. I couldn't see, couldn't breathe. Flailing, I kicked at the demon and reached out, reaching for anything, anything to anchor myself in the smothering bleak abyss—.

My shoes touched solid ground. The harbor returned, the brackish air heavy as lead in my heaving chest, the night almost glaringly bright after—after whatever that had been. I cried out in alarm, but Darius slapped a hand across my mouth to catch the sound before it could escape. "What the f—!" I choked through his fingers, throwing an elbow into the wall of his ribs. "Let me go—!"

"Be still," he snapped as he tightened his hold. "Do you want the entire marina to hear you?"

"Will you get off of me—?!" Choking, I surveyed my surroundings, then paused. We stood in the harbor still, but instead of concrete and scraggly ice plants underfoot, Darius and I stood on the deck of Mitch's yacht, cold beneath the looming shadow of the monstrous cargo ship creaking portside.

Confused, I realized Darius must have moved us via that strange ability of his to vanish and reappear at will, as I'd seen him do before, though I hadn't thought it to be such a traumatic experience. The hand over my lips smelled of ash and sulfur.

It was strangely exhilarating.

"You have to tell me what you did—later. Later." I eyed my fingers as if they would suddenly be swallowed by the waiting blackness again. I wasn't in a hurry to repeat the experience.

Darius said nothing as he passed me and paced the outer limit of the deck, footsteps silent as could be. When my ears stopped ringing, the muffled voices speaking inside the yacht's illuminated cabin became audible, Darius approaching one of the sloped windows cracked open for ventilation. He stood just beyond the light spilling from inside as he leaned against the fiberglass wall, beckoning to me, and when I joined him, I peered around the Sin's shoulder to look into the glass.

The interior kept with the lavish, overdone grandeur displayed outside the yacht, though the decadence fell short of classier designs, the white carpeting and marble trim too prevalent to be anything more than a money sink. I ground my teeth thinking about how much of my sister's blood had been spent to buy the gauche, overpriced furnishing, and when I spotted Mitch kneeling by an open panel safe depositing cash from a canvas bag, I had to swallow my urge to snarl.

A woman on a tacky, cheetah print party dress lounged on the bed, the thin straps slipping along her bony shoulders, Mitch dressed in a violet, three-piece monstrosity that spoke only of money, not taste. He finished stashing the stacks and closed the safe, turning, and I recoiled behind the apparently bulletproof demon when I spotted the .45 in his hand.

"Derek," the woman murmured as she sat up from the pillows, stretching a languid arm in his direction. Derek? Even his name was fake? A half-empty champagne bottle sat on the nightstand, close to the edge. "Why don't you leave that in the safe too?"

Mitch—Derek—tucked the pistol into the waistband of his slacks. "Can't be too careful now, can we, baby?" he replied in a voice utterly void of his affected Georgian drawl. He faked that as well, then. How did I not know? He leaned over the bed, one knee rising to rest on the mattress' edge, a trailing up the woman's bared thigh. "It'll go back in the safe once we're out of the city."

The woman grinned, the motion slow, dazed, part of her face hidden as she stroked the lapel of Mitch's horrid suit.

"I don't know why you wanna leave, D. You're making a fuss over nothing, yeah?"

"It's not nothing."

"It's nothin'. You should have gone; you would have seen. It was amazing—like standing in the presence of a god." She grabbed his lapel and her vacant eyes opened wide. "There's blood, y'know? Screaming. But it's quick enough. You should have been there, D, you should have seen him, should have watched how he—."

Mitch slapped the woman's hand, stopping her short. Outside the window, I trembled, my fist so tight in Darius' shirt the fabric stretched and the seams in the shoulder began to pop, not that he seemed to care. Though obviously inebriated, even I could understand the underlying meaning laced in the woman's slurred words; she'd been there, at the place where my family met the knife and Balthier appeared in Tara's blood. She made it sound so—so tawdry, every day, like murder was a slight inconvenience in the greater reality of demon summoning!

Rage pooled in my chest and ached like a physical thing demanding alleviation.

"I didn't go so I didn't have to see that garbage," Mitch snapped.

"Buzz-kill," the woman pouted, taking hold his tie, pulling Mitch nearer. "It's cos' you were sweet on her, right? That sister you were set on seducin'? Poor D, losing his toys."

Darius stiffened. Was...was she talking about me?!

Mitch snorted and tugged his tie from her mangling grip, though he didn't move away. "But that's the whole reason we have to get out of here, because it all worked out so well. We have to think with our heads, gotta be ahead of the game. That's how we got this far, yeah?"

She nodded. "I guess."

"It's bullshit, y'know? It's not—not real. All this occult stuff is—it's too much, and the crazy's getting too thick on the ground in this town. Someone's gonna catch some backlash over this, and it ain't gonna be us. Yeah?"

Again, the woman nodded, smiling, and returned, "Yeah."

"So we gotta get out of here before that backlash comes. What do I always say? We do the job, get paid, get out. And no, I don't care at all about that girl. Pretentious bitch bored me half to tears."

In the extremities of the cabin's glow, Darius's faint grin caught the light, and his teeth gleamed like new razors waiting to taste blood. His eyes—red again, red as rubies, reflecting that same fury find home in my skin—flicked in my direction and his grin widened. "I found the correct Mitch, did I not?"

Glowering, I forced my hand to release his shirt. Of course, I was here to verify Mitch's identity. Why else find me before making his move? "Yes. You did."

He turned to the window again and watched Mitch explore the woman's exposed skin while I averted my eyes. "Ahh. Your vengeance will be exquisite."

I didn't know what to say to that. I blinked, caught in the mire between incredulity and anger, as the Sin looked on and savored the sight of Mitch and his lover throwing wood upon their pyre. I knew Mitch and the woman would confess everything they knew to Darius; cowards, by nature, defaulted to self-preservation, and they'd sing loud and clear the moment they realized a literal demon had them by the throats.

Perhaps I should have been horrified by the prospective violence. In truth, I felt nothing. Stepping from the cabin light into the cooler shadows, I shut my eyes and clenched my shaking fists.

Yes, my vengeance would be exquisite.